President Barack Obama, in the heart of the U.S. auto industry, told a crowd of workers that the government bailouts of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC are giving taxpayers a return on their investment.

Heading into a congressional election season in which polls show the public skeptical about the $84.8 billion rescue and anxious about economy, Obama is using the backdrop of Detroit- area plants owned by GM and Chrysler to promote what he says is an industry revival that has saved more than a million jobs.

“The fact that we’re standing in this magnificent factory today is a testament to the decisions we made,” Obama said at a Chrysler factory that recently added a second shift of workers to build the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Obama told about 1,000 employees at the factory that, if his opponents had been successful in blocking aid for automakers, their jobs might not exist. Their efforts are “proving the naysayers wrong,” he said.

“They said we should just walk away and let those jobs go,” Obama said. “Today, this industry is growing stronger. It’s creating new jobs.”

Voter Skepticism

Voters aren’t persuaded. A Bloomberg National Poll conducted July 9-12 that shows the federal assistance package to automobile companies is becoming less popular: 48 percent say they became less supportive in recent months versus 17 percent who say they have become more supportive.

Steve Rattner, the former head of the president’s automotive task force, said that perception is disappointing.

“It appears that those of us behind it haven’t succeeded in convincing people that it’s worked,” he said in an interview.

Since GM and Chrysler exited bankruptcy a little more than a year ago, the industry — including Ford Motor Co., which didn’t seek federal aid — has re-hired 55,000 workers after shedding 334,000 in the year before.

So $84.8 billion spent, and 55,000 jobs rehired back.

Oh, and the 55,000 jobs that came back counts rehires for Ford, the company that didn’t take any of Obama’s bailouts. Or Bush’s, for that matter.

One million, five hundred and forty-one thousand, eight hundred and eighteen dollars per job. And Obama is pitching it as some kind of grand achievement worthy of a messiah.

Unions are happy. Of course, our children are ultimately going to be chained to giant millstones and forced to pull them in a circle for the rest of their lives. As will everyone else, including senior citizens – at least until they get “permanently retired” by a death panel. But unions are happy. And if you’re not happy, well, screw you, you racist.

Every single Clown Car GM sells is going to lose money. But that’s okay. Because Barry Hussein – courtesy of the American taxpayer – will subsidize every Clown Car that is sold at a loss.

As for Obama’s claim that he’s “saved” a million jobs, that’s the kind of reasoning that only someone idiotic enough to buy a $41,000 clown car to show how superior they are would buy. How about this: Bush saved fifty million jobs. If you don’t think he did, you prove he didn’t. In fact, Bush saved the world. Because aliens with superior technology would have invaded earth had Bush not been commander-in-chief. Prove they wouldn’t have.

“One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved,'” said Carnegie Mellon University professor Allan Mentzler. “It doesn’t exist for good reason: How can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” Which is to say, a purely rhetorical argument that no American president has ever in history had the naked chutzpah to use amounts to the heart of Obama’s economic policy.

Had George Bush used that asinine argument to justify his economic leadership and vision, he would have been laughed right out of the White House by the media. But Barack Obama is using the asinine argument, so it obviously must be true.

We are about to see why the Soviet Union failed. The government spent all kinds of money producing crap cars to keep the party proletariat employed. But they were crap cars. And nobody bought them. The same thing applies to Obama’s GM bailout and the Chevy Klown Kar. And the same with all the boondoggles Obama built with our trillion dollars (actually with what will become our $3.27 trillion, but who’s really counting any more?).

Obama’s boast about the auto industry jobs is a microchosm of the overall stupidity of Obama’s “stimulus.” We have spent over $534 BILLION (that’s the 62% of the $862 billion stimulus that has been spent so far) in order to create some 599,108 jobs.

Do the math.

That boils down to an average of $892,220 PER JOB.

I mean, that ridiculous figure is less than the even more ridiculous figure of more than $1.5 million for each union auto job. But then again, some of those nearly 600,000 jobs probably weren’t union, which accounts for the relatively trivial figure of $892,000.

Obama is cheering all this, but the term “Pyrrhic victory” comes to mind. These victories are going to implode America into a ruin unlike anything that even historians have ever heard of.

Unlike the commission set up by President Obama — packed only with environmental activists and no petroleum engineers — the commission unanimously approved by the Natural Resources committee would be comprised of technical experts to study the actual events leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Not a single member of the committee voiced opposition at the bill’s markup. The Senate has also approved an independent commission.

“To investigate what went wrong and keep it from happening again, the commission must include members who have expertise in petroleum engineering. The President’s Commission has none,” Cassidy, the amendment’s author, told HUMAN EVENTS after the announcement. “It defies common sense that this amendment passed unanimously in committee, only to be deleted in the Speaker’s office.”

Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), top Republican on the Natural Resources Committee said the Obama’s administration’s commission was set up to protect the President.

“By deleting the bipartisan, independent oil spill commission that’s received bipartisan support in both House and Senate committees, Democrats have shown they are more interested in protecting the President than getting independent answers to what caused this tragic Gulf spill. Some of the biggest failures that contributed to the Gulf disaster are the direct responsibility of the federal government and by deleting this bipartisan, independent commission, Democrats ensure that only the President’s hand-picked commission will be digging into any failures of his own Interior Department appointees. There is widespread agreement that no member of the President’s commission possesses technical expertise in oil drilling, and several are on the record in opposition to offshore drilling and support a moratorium that will cost thousands of jobs,” Hastings said.

The bill also sets up myriad regulations and new standards and laws for drilling that have nothing to do with offshore drilling.

“Even more outrageous is this bill’s attempt to use the oil spill tragedy as leverage to enact totally unrelated policies and increase federal spending on unrelated programs by billions of dollars. What does a solar panel in Nevada, a wind turbine in Montana, uranium for nuclear power, or a ban on fish farming have to do with the Gulf spill? Nothing — but the spill is a good excuse to try and pass otherwise stalled or unpopular new laws,” Hastings said.

Another member of the committee, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), pointed out the hand-picked Obama commission is just getting underway with no findings or recommendations made.

“This ‘fix it’ bill is being rammed through without an accurate and full understanding of what actually went wrong. The Presidential Commission is just barely beginning its work, no investigations are yet concluded, and the failed [blowout preventer] still on the ocean floor, yet we are voting on a bill without knowing what went wrong,” Fleming said.

“Furthermore, at a time when Washington should be focused on creating jobs, this bill will do just the opposite by hampering future energy development and stifling job creation along the Gulf Coast,” Fleming added. “This knee-jerk legislation — coupled with the Administration’s damaging Moratorium on offshore drilling — will worsen, not help, the situation.”

Yet the House is poised to vote this week on the CLEAR Act, likely Friday.

“This bill has less to do with preventing another spill than it does preventing domestic energy production,” Cassidy said.

UPDATE: House Republicans released bullets on the CLEAR Act this morning breaking down some of the measures included in the bill, including:

– Imposes job-killing changes and higher taxes for onshore natural gas and oil production. It fundamentally changes leasing onshore by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which affects not just leasing for natural gas and oil, but also for renewable energy including wind and solar. Forest Service and BLM leasing are shoved into the three new agencies that are replacing the former Minerals Management Service (MMS).

– Creates over $30 billion in new mandatory spending for two programs that have nothing to do with the oil spill (the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Historic Preservation Fund). In the version of the bill headed to the House floor, Democrats added brand new language that expressly allows this $30 billion to be earmarked by the Appropriations Committee.

– Raises taxes by over $22 billion in ten years – with the taxes eventually climbing to nearly $3 billion per year. This is a direct tax on natural gas and oil that will raise energy prices for American families and businesses, hurt domestic jobs, and increase our dependence on foreign oil. This tax only applies to U.S. oil and gas production on federal leases – giving an advantage to foreign oil and hurting American energy jobs.

– Requires the federal takeover of state authority to permit in state waters, which reverses sixty years of precedent. The mismanagement, corruption and oversight failures of the federal government are being used as justification to expand federal control by seizing management from the states.

– Allows 10% of all offshore revenues – an amount possibly as high as $500 million per year – to be spent on a new fund controlled by the Interior Secretary to issue ocean research grants (ORCA fund). There is no requirement that the fund is used for the Gulf region or anything related to oil spills or offshore drilling. These funds can be earmarked.

If this wasn’t yet another way that Democrats are scheming to implode this country, it would be hilarious. This bill is akin to my shooting you, and then using the shooting incident to pitch my gun-ban agenda.

You DO have to applaud the Democrats for their creative use of oxymorons. I mean, to take a bill that deliberately prevents any kind of transparent independent investigation, and call it the “CLEAR Act,” is really something else.

Don’t forget to bid on my bridge. You might be able to win it cheap!

And you can trust me not to rip you off, of course. Because I’m at least as honest as Nancy Pelosi.

Oops. My bad. Nancy Pelosi famously promised to “drain the swamp,” but then she helped fill it instead. So I’d have to be a total slimeball indeed not to be as honest as Nancy Pelosi.

It was the late 1980s, and I experienced something that will probably puzzle me for the rest of my life on this earth.

I had ordered “Blazer Cable” so that I could see the Portland Trailblazer home games. And in order to help pay for it – and to make it more fun to watch – I got a few friends to go in on it with me.

One night, one of my friends brought one of his friends over on a night when the Blazers were playing the Chicago Bulls. I thought the guy had some faulty wiring from about the moment I met him, but, what they hey.

In any event, to get to the point, at some point during the game my friend’s friend was sitting on the couch alone with me (everybody else was either in the kitchen or in the bathroom, as it was halftime). They were interviewing Michael Jordan. And he looked over at me and said, “Would you trade places with Michael Jordan?”

This was like the stupidest questions I had ever heard, and I’ve heard quite a few stupid questions.

“Of course I would,” I said. I mean, duh. Michael Jordan was strikingly handsome, he was filthy rich, he was incredibly successful, and he was one of the best athletes in the history of the human race. And I wouldn’t want to trade places with him why, exactly?

Well, yeah. I waited to hear the cross-eyed albino boy start playing a banjo.

At the time, I was too astonished to be angry at the guy. It was like encountering someone who – in spite of massive evidence to the contrary – believed he was invisible to the human eye.

I’ve thought about that few second encounter a number of times since. It still amazes me to this very day. How can somebody possibly get that stupid?

In the years before that moment, and since then, I had known some black men who were total turds. And I have known some black men whom I regarded as having superior character to my own.

Lumping people into racial groups and then judging people on the basis of the color of their skin is every bit as stupid as not wanting to change places with Michael Jordan simply “because he’s black.” But I see it being done all the time these days. By the left.

I was raised to regard character, intelligence, virtue, attitude and attractiveness of personality as the qualities that determined the value of a person. It had never even occurred to me to think that the color of one’s skin made on more or less valuable.

I was also raised to want to continue to improve myself. I was raised to want to become a better human being, to improve my station in, and my quality of, life.

I think that’s why I react so viscerally to the racial attitude inherent in modern liberalism. To pit people against each other on the basis of color and bigotry, and to label white people as being evil and somehow complicit in some kind of white power structure is bad enough. But it goes beyond that.

It’s self-taught, self-limiting perpetual victimhood. It’s providing a class of people with a ready-made excuse for failure; it’s discouraging them from even really bothering to try, and rewarding them for not trying; it’s an evil exchange in which one accepts all kinds of control over their lives in exchange for destructive and cancerous welfare; it’s wallowing in an attitude of bitterness and even self-loathing that dooms one to a life of misery. It is a guaranteed perpetuation of failure.

It is a completely alien worldview to me. Every bit as much as that idiot who wouldn’t trade places with Michael Jordan “because he’s black.”

I made the earlier comment that I’ve met black men whom I regarded as being superior to me in the thing that I value most – character. They were examples to me, and as a result of their friendship, I became a better person. I’ve also known a number of white men whose superior character helped me advance in my own life. The point is that you desire excellence, and you take it wherever you can find it.

I have a feeling that Pastor C.L. Bryant would be one of those men, were I fortunate enough to know him.

Comedian Eddie Murphy once joked that Lincoln forgot to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and that people should go out and claim their slaves. I’m here to tell you that the Democratic Party took that request seriously and have claimed their slaves.
When 98 percent of African-Americans vote Democrat, that tells me that they are psychological and economic slaves to a Party that structures its fiscal policy to keep the black man down.

Welfare policy, government-forced affirmative action, reduced testing requirements for minorities…these are all things that don’t serve to elevate people to greatness, rather, they keep people down.

This video is a movie trailer about a man who proposes that these slaves to the liberals run away from the slave plantation that liberals have created. Its creator, Pastor C.L. Bryant, holds an honest discussion about black conservatives in America. Quote the man, “Run away from the slavery of tyranny toward the blessings of liberty!” Check it out:

David Horowitz rightly calls African-Americans “the human shields of the Democrat Party.” It simply a fact of history that modern African-Americans have come hat-in-hand to the Party of Slavery, and the Party of the Ku Klux Klan.

“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life” (Foner 1989, p. 425–426).

Let us never forget that Democrats were the party of slavery. And that Democrats were the creators of the Ku Klux Klan. It literally took a war in which Democrats had to be militarily crushed to keep them from enslaving people based on the color of their skin. And thank God for the Republican Party and a Republican president for freeing the slaves from Democrats. Let’s not forget that Woodrow Wilson – Democrat president and the father of the progressive movement – RE-segregated the military after Republicans had DE-segregated it. Let us not forget that Wilson cheered the racist propaganda film “Birth of a Nation.” Let us never forget that the national party convention that was so directly tied to the Ku Klux Klan that it was called the “Klanbake” was the 1924 DEMOCRAT convention. Let’s not forget that FDR’s New Deal directly attacked blacks and kept them from getting jobs.

As we move into the 1950s we find that a Democrat Governor, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard in 1957 to prevent black children being integrated into white schools. And again, a Republican president had to rise to the occasion, with Dwight D. Eisenhower sending in US Army airborne troops to enforce racial equality that had once again been opposed by Democrats. And of course Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace would fight for racist segregation all over again in 1963. It was Democrat John F. Kennedy who sent in the troops this time. But few are aware that that same John Kennedy had previously voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act.

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”77 On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So now conservatives are suddenly racists for agreeing with Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. and against liberals and the vile pseudo values that the greatest civil rights leaders in history condemned?

Richard Nixon, whom Democrats love to make the poster boy for “Republican racism,” was in fact the first president to introduce the racial quotas that Democrats have been trying to implement and expand ever since. Which is to say that, if you want to argue that Nixon was a racist, Democrats have been baptizing themselves in Nixon’s racism ever since. And if Nixon employed a racially immoral strategy to win whites, the Democrat Party has employed the flip-side of that same immoral strategy to win blacks.

Liberals are biblical – and never in a good way:

PSA 52:3 You love evil more than good, Falsehood more than speaking what is right.
MIC 3:2 “You who hate good and love evil, Who tear off their skin from them And their flesh from their bones

There are men and women of basic virtue in every race, and even every creed. The problem is that there are fewer and fewer of these, while the men and women of apathy, degeneration and self-centeredness abound.

Slavery is a terrible thing. But it is even worse when one willingly applies the shackles to his or her own wrists and ankles and demands the right to a government-imposed easy way out, in pathetic contrast to the principle from an Aesop fable, “Better to starve free than be a fat slave.”

Obama Justice Department outrages never cease. The politically charged gang led by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is more interested in helping felons vote than in helping the military to vote. Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, has put a legislative hold on the already troubled nomination of James M. Cole to be deputy attorney general until the attorney general ensures full protection for voting rights of our military (and associated civilian personnel) stationed abroad. The senator is right to raise a ruckus.

Mr. Cornyn co-authored a 2009 law mandating that states mail absentee ballots to military voters at least 45 days before the election. Yet, as former Justice Department lawyer Eric Eversole first reported in The Washington Times last week, the department seems to be encouraging states to apply for waivers so they won’t have to follow that law. More than 17,000 Americans serving overseas were denied the vote in 2008– but, presumably because military personnel are thought to lean conservative, the liberal Obama administration is in no hurry to correct the situation.

The Justice Department is so unenthusiastic about military voting that its website still lists the old requirement for a shorter 30-day military voting window, rather than the current law mandating 45 days. On the other hand, the Justice Departmenthas no legislative mandate whatsoever to involve itself with helping felons to vote, but its website devotes a large section – 2,314 words – to advising felons how to regain voting privileges.

Obama understands that the Democrat Party is the type of corrupt organized criminal enterprise that attracts criminals to vote for it. Just as he understands that the men and women who put their lives on the line for America’s freedom are not folks he wants to encourage to vote.

News outlets that are focusing on the incendiary rhetoric of conservatives outside President Obama’s town hall meeting Tuesday ignored the incendiary rhetoric — and even violence — of liberals outside an appearance by former President George W. Bush in 2002.

When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting “Bush is a terrorist!”, the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.

One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush’s assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple.

“BUSH: WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE,” read the placard, which had an X over the word “ALIVE.”

So Bush was evil for fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Obama is only a little bit guilty for completely lying about getting us out, and not a bloodthirsty warmonger at all. Even though Bush got us into a war that we could win, whereas Obama said Bush’s war that we could win was evil, and we needed to put all our eggs in Vietnam I mean Afghanistan instead.

Barack Obama is a month away from equaling the total number of American casualties that George Bush lost in his entire eight years of war in Afghanistan. Obama is every bit as much of a warmonger as George Bush ever was.

But that’s only part of Obama’s crimes against humanity.

Barack Obama is also guilty of crimes against human beings being able to have a job.

During a 45-minute conference call with journalists from 40 major media outlets this morning, Jack Gerard shared some startling predictions about the future health of the nation’s oil and natural gas industry if the Obama Administration gets its way in adding more regulation and increasing taxes on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The biggest one of all is enough to cause anyone to take pause:

“The administration’s moratorium, if continued indefinitely — or similar legislative proposals which would make the deep water unavailable or uneconomic — would cost this country 175,000 jobs every year between now and 2035, according to our latest analysis,” said Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, a group representing some 400 oil and natural gas companies.

And that’s not all!

“The Gulf of Mexico accounts for 30 percent of our domestic oil production and 13 percent of natural gas,” Gerard explained. “The deepwater areas account for 80 percent of the Gulf’s oil production and 45 percent of its natural gas production. Twenty of the highest-producing leases are in the deep water.”

When one considers that the oil and natural gas industry, according to Gerard, supports 9.2 million workers and 7.5 percent of all U.S. gross domestic product, even a small percent of decline can have a tremendous impact on the economy.

According to an API-produced report released today, the economic impact of a complete shutdown of deepwater drilling would yield some awful results. For instance:

Reduce direct and indirect employment in the oil & gas and its service industries by 93,000 jobs – every year through 2035;

Reduce an additional 82,000 jobs every year through 2035 in non oil & gas related industries due to less income in the economy;

Reduce annual GDP by over $20 billion per year or a cumulative impact of approximately $500 billion in the next 25 years;

Reduce long-term U.S. oil production by 27 percent; and

Increase long-term U.S. foreign oil imports by 19 percent.

And so we can add “crimes against employment” to “crimes against humanity.”

“The inherent right to work is one of the elemental privileges of a free people. Continued failure to achieve that right and privilege by anyone who wants to work and needs work is a challenge to our civilization and to our security.”

I submit, therefore, that Barack Obama is guilty of crimes against humanity – and by the very standards that Democrats created.

It’s really amazing, this fallout from the White House’s involvement in the firing of Shirley Sherrod, and how the mainstream media has used it to demagogue Fox News and conservatives.

Andrew Breitbart is depicted as having “edited” the video of Shirley Sherrod. They’ve used that word over and over again in an attempt deliberately to convey the fallacious impression that the video was changed and that Shirley Sherrod didn’t really say what Breitbart said she said.

The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he — he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But he had come to me for help. What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him.

I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I — I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the — or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him.

So I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had…attended some of the training that we had provided, ’cause Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer. So I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him.

“I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him.”

So let’s just get that out of the way, once and for all. Shirley Sherrod said EXACTLY what the Breitbart video said she said. Period.

The mainstream media, the NAACP, and the Obama White House has made all kinds of hay out of Sherrod’s saying it wasn’t ENTIRELY about white versus black:

That’s when it was revealed to me that, ya’ll, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white — it is about white and black, but it’s not — you know, it opened my eyes, ’cause I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hand, and felt okay, I’ve done my job

So Shirley Sherrod says that it’s not ONE HUNDRED PERCENT about white versus black, and that’s supposed to be enough to overcome all accusation that she’s got a huge problem with race?

You see, I’ve still got a problem with her remarks. We’re supposed to believe that Shirley Sherrod has somehow totally transcended her previous racism, but why should we think that?

From the speech in question itself, contrast this:

The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he — he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing.

with this bit from the same speech:

You know, I haven’t seen such a mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. Some of the racism we thought was buried. Didn’t it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bush’s and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.

First of all, yeah, right, Shirley. You sure didn’t “do the stuff,” did you?

But my primary point is that this woman started off with a cynical, bigoted, and hateful attitude toward white people – which she revealed in her attitude toward the farmer – and she STILL has a cynical, bigoted, and hateful attitude toward white people.

And she displays that attitude in the very speech in which she’s given so much credit for not being racist. She tells us in that very same speech that to be opposed to ObamaCare is to be a racist.

She said Fox showed no professionalism in continuing to bother her for an interview, but failing to correct their coverage.

“I think they should but they won’t. They intended exactly what they did. “They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

But yet again, Shirley Sherrod is a racist liar without dignity or character.

Fox News didn’t run a report on the controversy until after Sherrod had resigned under White House pressure and after the NAACP had issued a press release condemning Sherrod.

If anything, it appears that it’s BARRY HUSSEIN and the NAACP that wants to keep black people looking down. THEY were the ones who acted first. Fox News didn’t fire you, Shirley; Barry’s regime fired you. And when Fox News reported the story and played the video AFTER the Barry Hussein regime fired you, their “crime” was to assume that the president of the United States and the NAACP were not racists, and were not shockingly incompetent morons.

Fox News’ crime was that it didn’t realize that – to allude to Obama’s Attorney General – that the Obama administration wasn’t “a White House of cowards” on race.

They asked me to resign, and, in fact, they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia yesterday,” Sherrod told CNN. “I had at least three calls telling me the White House wanted me to resign…and the last one asked me to pull over to the side of the road and do it.”

Sherrod said the final call came from Cheryl Cook, an undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture. Sherrod said White House officials wanted her to quit immediately because the controversy was “going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”

Let’s place the blame where it squarely belongs: on a cowardly White House that was willing to toss “it’s own kind” to the wolves out of naked, peeing-on-themselves-in-submissive-urination fear of Glenn Beck and Fox News.

But loathsome race-baiting hypocrites like Shirley Sherrod and virtually every “reporter” on the mainstream media don’t bother to cover the actual facts.

What this story really tells us – besides the fact that the Obama administration is cowardly and despicable – is that you can trust that you will NEVER get the truth from the mainstream media about anything.

Washington (CNN) – Americans approval of how President Barack Obama is handling the nation’s economy has dropped to its lowest level of his presidency, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey indicates that 42 percent of the public approves of how Obama’s dealing with the economy, down 2 points from March, with 57 percent disapproving of his performance on the economy, up 2 points from March. The survey’s Friday release comes as the president made comments at the White House on what he termed the progress made this week on the economy and job recovery.

The poll suggests a wide partisan divide on the issue, with nearly eight in 10 Democrats giving the president a thumbs up and nearly nine in 10 Republicans disapproving of Obama’s job on the economy. According to the survey, two-thirds of independents disapprove of the president’s economic performance.

“The public hasn’t given Obama good marks on the economy since last September, and his approval rating on the economy, now at 42 percent, has been stuck in the mid-to-low 40s throughout this year,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Part of the reason for that is that Americans haven’t seen much to cheer about on the economic front. Nearly eight in ten say that economic conditions are somewhat poor or very poor.”

While there were some vague signs of optimism in poll results earlier this year – when the number of Americans who said that the economy was in “very poor” shape had been slowly but steadily declining – that seems to have fizzled. Thirty-seven percent said things were in poor shape in our May poll; the same number feel that way now.

So what can Barry Hussein do? Lying about his bogus “summer of recovery” isn’t working.

And he can’t agree with other Democrats that we should keep the Bush tax cuts in place in order to prevent damaging the economy even more. He’s too much of an ideologue for that.

Democrats are considering a plan to delay tax hikes on the wealthy for two years because the economic recovery is slow and they fear getting crushed in November’s election.

It could mean a big reprieve for families earning $250,000 and above annually.

President George W. Bush’s tax cuts will expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts to delay their sunset.

Some Democrats are now arguing forcefully that a delay is a win-win plan that would help the federal budget without hurting the economy.

Wealthy families would not have an incentive to cut back on spending and budget writers could assume an inflow of tax funds in future years, making five- and 10-year budget projections look less scary.

How long have the Democrats been demonizing the Bush tax cuts? Seven long years? And now more and more of them are arguing – likely out of fear for their own political skins – that they were misrepresenting the truth all along, and the Bush tax cuts maybe didn’t actually cause the Dark Ages after all.

But Obama is way too much of an ideologue for that kind of rubbish. That kind of acknowledgment is about as likely as a bomb-vest-wearing terrorist acknowledging that maybe Allah ISN’T so great, after all.

So what’s Obama to do?

Only one option remaining: keep blaming Bush and Republicans. No matter how obviously asinine it is, never quit blaming, never quit trying to divert attention for his failures to some GOP straw man.

The last time Republicans ran Congress in January 2007, unemployment was at 4.6%.

Whenever you get new laws and “reform,” unintended consequences are sure to follow.

Usually they take awhile.

Not so with Dodd-Frank.

WSJ reports that Ford has already yanked a bond deal, because the ratings agencies, fearing legal liability, won’t let the automaker puts their ratings in the prospectus, making a sale impossible.

So did Dodd-Frank just kill the bond market? Well, probably not.. Regulators will likely find some way around this impasse, but it’s still amusing to see the bill INSTANTLY slow down the gears of capitalism (or at least capital raising) as its fiercest critics might have suggested.

Ford Motor Co.’s financing arm pulled plans to issue new debt, the first casualty of a bond market thrown into turmoil by the financial overhaul signed into law Wednesday.

Market participants said the auto maker pulled a recent deal, backed by packages of auto loans, because it was unable to use credit ratings in its offering documents, a legal requirement for such sales. The company declined to comment.

The nation’s dominant ratings firms have in recent days refused to allow their ratings to be used in bond registration statements. The firms, including Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch …

Oh, well. Nobody needs those stupid jobs that Ford would have financed through an expansion, anyway. And who really cares if numerous deals that would have happened don’t now because of “finance reform”? Surely we’re all fine with scraping our own feces to heat our homes as in the other socialist Utopia in North Korea? Who isn’t willing to personally suffer to punish those greedy businesses?

Saying the economic outlook was “unusually uncertain,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke predicted that unemployment was likely to remain stubbornly high for several years, straining families and endangering the nation’s economic stability and competitiveness.

“Long-term unemployment not only imposes exceptional near-term hardships on workers and their families; it also erodes skills and may have long-lasting effects on workers’ employment and earnings prospects,” he said Wednesday in his semiannual testimony to Congress.

“This is the worst labor market, the worst episode, since the Great Depression,” Bernanke said of long-term unemployment. “Not only for the sake of the unemployed and for the short-term strength of the economy but also for a long-term viability in international competitiveness, I think we need to be very seriously concerned.”

We look at the financial reform imposed by the Democrats and realize that it will cost banks billions and make them even more reluctant to lend than they already are even as they pass the increased costs to their customers in the form of a tax from Obama to you.

In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance climbed last week, the government said Thursday.

There were 464,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended July 17, up 37,000 from a revised 427,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.

The number of claims was much higher than expected. A consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected new claims to rise to 445,000.

“It’s very disappointing to have this leading indicator of economic conditions jump higher,” said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “This is the latest reminder of a weak labor market, and the jump preserves worries regarding the adequacy of economic growth.”

“It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here,” said a teary-eyed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done.”

Never let a crisis go to waste.

If you are a Democrat, I suggest you burn your testicles off with a blowtorch. Because that would be change. And of course change is good. And who really cares about the irrelevant details of “change,” anyway?

Analyst Meredith Whitney, famous for being one of the very, very few who predicted the economic disaster in 2008, has made another prediction that no one listened to:

“They say we shouldn’t provide unemployment insurance because it costs money. So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed.”

First of all, Obama is flat-out misstating the facts when he demagogues Republicans for being the party of fiscal responsibility. Please read this article on the subject if you have any doubts about that. The basic bottom line: it was a Republican Congress following the 1994 Republican landslide that imposed fiscal responsibility. It is CONGRESS that has the power to spend; and the Republicans’ number one platform in their Contract with America was fiscal responsibility.

Next, Obama is flat-out lying when he says that Republicans say we shouldn’t provide unemployment insurance because it costs money. That is a lie. Obama is a liar. And it is immoral of him to slander people like that. The fact of the matter is that the Republicans have no objection to providing unemployment insurance; all they demand is that it be paid for. And they want it to come out of that $862 billion stimulus that didn’t create any jobs.

“The fact is, an extension to help American families was passed unanimously in the House before it was blocked by a handful of Senate Republicans,” said Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “The only point some Senate Republicans have succeeded in making is that they are out of touch with the harsh reality that some families all across America are facing today.”

Republicans respond that they’re not opposed to extending unemployment benefits but want to offset the $9 billion cost with spending cuts elsewhere.

“We both want to extend unemployment benefits,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), the GOP‘s No. 3 leader. “The Democrats want to do it by adding to the debt. Republicans don’t want to add to the debt.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement that Republicans were trying to prevent adding tens of billions of dollars of debt at a time when Americans are growing alarmed at its rate of growth.“So the only reason the unemployment extension hasn’t passed is because Democrats simply refuse to pass a bill that doesn’t add to the debt,” McConnell said. “That’s it. That’s the only difference between what they’ve offered and what we’ve offered.”

“Some Republican leaders actually treat this unemployment insurance as if it’s a form of welfare. They say it discourages folks from looking for work. Well, I’ve met a lot of folks looking for work these past few years, and I can tell you, I haven’t met any Americans who would rather have an unemployment check than a meaningful job that lets you provide for your family.”

But, first of all, as we prepare to extend unemployment from 99 weeks to 123 weeks, it should be pointed out: this IS welfare. You show me the employee who paid for what is currently running over 2 1/4 years’ worth of benefits.

And then you answer the question that no Democrat will answer: Is there any point at which you will agree that an employee has had enough unemployment benefits?

Shouldn’t Democrats just be honest for once in their lives and say, “We don’t think any of these people should ever be forced to get a job. If they keep voting Democrat, we intend to keep extending their unemployment until America implodes and there isn’t a country for us to exploit for our partisan political ambitions any more.”

We’ve already covered THE FACT that Republicans have been willing to vote to extend unemployment provided the funds be paid for; particularly from the stimulus. So Obama now seizes upon some Republicans’ legitimate concern that the unemployment merry-go has no end to falsely demonize the entire Republican brand.

What Republicans are saying is not “vilifying” out of work families; it is expressing a fact of human nature.

Looking for work sucks; particularly in a heinous job market where they may well have to accept something less than what they want. People tend to put off unpleasant tasks until forced to do so. And even if they go out and look for work, they tend to do so in a half-assed manner. So if you keep providing a benefit that allows them to forestall the unpleasantness of trying to find a job, they’ll tend to put off looking for work. That’s not vilification; it’s human nature.

I once lost a job, and I put off looking for work until I was on the verge of running out of benefits. I was a little depressed, I was tired, and I took a few months’ break. If I’d had several years’ worth of continually-extended ad infinitum benefits, I frankly can’t tell you what I would have done.

Fortunately I didn’t. Circumstances forced my hand, and I got another job and moved on with my life.

Obama depicted himself as a candidate for president who would transcend the political divide and govern in a bipartisan manner. Instead, he lied, and became the most polarizing and partisan demagogue in American history.

Obama is a documented and proven liar; even the New York Times is acknowledging that Obama – who pledged that no American making under $200,000 a year would see any tax increases, and then swore that the ObamaCare mandate did not constitute a tax increase – is now arguing that in fact ObamaCare is a massive tax on the backs of the middle class.

Obama is the kind of monster who constantly attacks and demonizes the other side and then demands they “put aside partisan differences” and vote for a hard-core partisan liberal agenda or face further demonization. His constant “they oppose change” attack is quintessentially fascistic; it is identical with the “they oppose change” attacks of Hitler, Stalin, and other tyrants throughout history.

The sooner this man is out of the White House, the sooner America will have a chance to finally recover.